Education Policy & School Reform News

Several states are making progress empowering their citizens with access to education freedom and opportunity. Earlier this month, Alabama became the 15th state in the nation to enact a program providing education savings accounts and the 10th state to enact universal education choice. Last week, South Carolina and Louisiana took steps to become the 11th…

In the midst of the school choice movement’s most successful legislative season last year, The Hill asked: “School choice won big in states this year. Is the movement about to hit a wall?” If it did hit a wall, as the news outlet suggested, the school choice movement burst right through that wall. Sure, the…

Public universities in Texas are in the sights of the latest undercover investigation by the Accuracy in Media team to reveal schools’ flagrant disregard for the law in red states. “Now that a number of states have prohibited DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and critical race theory in higher education, we decided to take our…

The Higher Education Act, signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, profoundly influences almost every facet of higher education in America. Today, this law governs federal student aid, including all loans and grants and work-study. It defines what constitutes an academic year and “gainful employment.” And it authorizes numerous other federal programs that…

Florida long has been a pioneer in providing families with education freedom and choice. It was among the first states to enact both tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, and to expand those options to every K–12 student in the state. With 350,000 students participating in the state’s K–12 scholarship policies, Florida has both the…

Touchdown Arizona! Philanthropist Janine Yass penned a column recently that was so delightfully perfect about the importance of school choice and how we as a country seem to be more engaged in football scores than test scores that I can kick myself for not having written it myself. She referenced an NFL upset victory of…

New research estimates that some students’ grades will never catch back up after falling during the pandemic. Recently, some in the mainstream media worried that the federal taxpayer money that lawmakers sent to K-12 schools during COVID-19 may not be enough to help schools turn things around. But public schools—also known as “assigned” schools—had money…

A school choice revolution is sweeping the nation. Ten states have passed universal education choice initiatives in the past two years. In addition to private school tuition, most of these new programs allow families to use their children’s taxpayer-funded education dollars to cover certain homeschool expenses.  The loudest and most influential pushback against school choice comes from…

Charter schools, which are public schools authorized by state laws, differ from traditional public schools, primarily because they enjoy exemptions from most of the state’s educational bureaucracy and regulations in exchange for accountability to parents and authorizers. The authorizers negotiate the charter contract, under which the school promises to operate in certain ways, and those…

The school choice policies sweeping the nation may be among the most innovative—and promising—enacted in recent memory. Yet they also embody a return to principles first enshrined in American law nearly 400 years ago. In 1642, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony crafted the nation’s first education law, its objective was clear: Parents must educate their…